Sunday, November 18, 2007

The Cupboard is Bare Pizza

Saturday, November 17, 2008One really nice thing about having frozen pizza dough on hand is that you almost always have a few things on hand that you can put on top of a crust, and, after it's been baked on high heat on top of a pizza stone for five or ten minutes, it doesn't look like a meal born of desperation. Well, more like laziness actually. I had fallen behind in my novel writing, what with book club and a fundraiser that I felt that I had to go to, and work, of course, which always seems to get in the way of my projects.I took the pizza dough out of the freezer in the morning and figured I'd go grocery shopping later. At dinner time, I was still trying to get up to 33,000 words, so I just looked around to see what I had. It turned out that I had onions, a few olives, sun-dried tomatoes, some wilty-looking basil, and Monterey Jack and Parmesan cheeses. Peter Reinhart recommends no more than three or four ingredients atop a pizza, and he's probably right. I may have had more weight than I should have asked this thin crust to hold, but I don't know what I would have taken off. I caramelized the onions, chopped the olives and tomatoes, chiffonaded the basil, and grated the cheeses--you can do all that in the time that it takes for the oven to get up to 550. Put together a salad and pour some wine while the pizza bakes and hey presto! Dinner is served.

When we were in graduate school, when pizza was pretty much defined by red sauce and conventional toppings of the Italian sausage, green peppers and muchrooms varieties, we and friends would make "poverty pizza" with just about any savory leftovers and knobs of cheese that had made it to Friday night. It was always edible and sometimes even memorable, but always unrepeatable. It did widen all our horizons about what could make good pizza toppings.

Carol,I remember the days when sausage, pepperoni, and mushrooms were the mainstays of pizza--and the only cheese was mozzarella, and lots of it. Parmesan was exotic--no Parmigiano Reggiano, of course--and goat cheese unheard of. And you'd never think of making a pizza without red sauce. The pizza was good, but it's so nice to have all the other choices. I love the "poverty pizza" story!